Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia vs The Lost March

Compare Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia and The Lost March side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia	The Lost March
Genre	Fantasy	Fantasy
Tags	Classic Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl, Exploration, Hexcrawl, Random Tables, Vancian Casting, Descending AC, Base-Building, Domain Management, Crunchy	Classic Fantasy, Sandbox, Exploration, Hexcrawl, Dungeon Crawl, Faction Play, Domain Management, Random Character Creation, Vancian Casting, Inventory Management
Core Mechanic	Attacks roll 1d20 plus modifiers against a class-and-level target for the defender's Armor Class. Saving throws roll 1d20 against class-and-level targets. Ability checks roll 1d20 at or below the relevant ability score.	A skill check rolls a pool of d6s equal to the skill level: one to five dice, plus a die for some class bonuses. Normally a 6 is a success and a 5 is a partial success. An Ability adjustment either widens the success range or adds a critical-failure range on the lowest faces. Settlement, wilderness and combat checks are opposed by the referee's dice, where equal results cancel and a partial success downgrades a full one. In combat, successes and partial successes are assigned to attack or defend. A hit deals the weapon's maximum damage on a success or its minimum on a partial success.
Dice	d20	d6 dice pool
Complexity	High	Low
Availability	Paid	Free core rules
Runnability	5 of 5 book tools	4 of 5 book tools
License	All Rights Reserved	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	No verified route found	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	TSR, Inc.	Fausto Botta
Year	1991	2025
Languages	English, Japanese	English
Best For	Groups who want a classic fantasy campaign that grows from dangerous dungeon expeditions to managing a territory. It suits tables willing to learn additional procedures as the campaign expands.	Groups who want a long old-school sandbox campaign that turns treasure into faction rank, training and eventually conquered land.
Highlights	Dungeon turn procedures make exploration a schedule of resource use and encounter checks. The War Machine resolves large battles without playing out every soldier's attack. Stronghold costs and dominion income give adventurers rules for becoming rulers.	There are no hit points: wounds lower Ability scores directly, so an injured character can carry less treasure home. The lawful factions sell ranks and months of training for gold, so treasure replaces experience as the advancement currency. Each exploration turn, the referee secretly rolls hazard dice sized by difficulty (1d6 on plains, 3d6 in swamps), and each 5 or 6 adds a complication or an encounter.
Considerations	Dwarf, elf, and halfling classes normally have lower level caps than human classes. Starting ability scores are random, so a character may not qualify for a preferred class. Characters normally die at 0 hit points, making low-level encounters risky.	Dice resolve only a set of defined checks, so players usually get past traps and puzzles by describing what their characters do rather than by rolling a skill. Wounds normally heal at one Ability point per day of rest, and ten or more days of healing cost a month of training. Characters begin as agents of a supremacist colonial reconquest, a premise the book states openly and asks the referee to expose through play.